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Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.

Don't worry this universal cooling thing is just a great big hoax designed to spur the passage of anti-freedom pollution regulations before the supposed "heat death of the universe." Just ignore the alarmists, the universe has been cooling for a long time and I'm sure it can adapt.

No, he was talking about both the minus and the degree sign.
But you are right the degree symbol is indeed not ASCII, but ISO-Latin-1 (a very common 8 bit charset which is a subset of ASCII). Oddly enough, Slashdot still removes it, even though it predates Unicode.

Why the hell would he do such a braindead thing? Or is this a case of pre-typing his comment in Word, which mangles it, before copy-pasting it back into the browser. Or does Internet Exploder now also do "smart-quotes" (smart minus?)

As I said in one other comment, the minus sign is in all character sets, even the oldest one, because it is a sign for an arithmetic operation. And arithmetic signs were present in character sets since the dawn of the computing age, since computation was their primary purpose b

...And arithmetic signs were present in character sets since the dawn of the computing age, since computation was their primary purpose back then....

Technically, the only proper mathematical operator that's ever been available for use on any keyboard is the + character. The proper symbol for subtraction has never been available (instead, we've made do with the hyphen), and the asterisk and forward slash have all but entirely replaced the '×' and '÷' characters*.

The proper arithmetic signs for multiplication and division have also (to my knowledge) never been properly recognized in programming languages as a routine, variable, or anything el

Actually, according to the poster, it's heated up by a considerable margin. "Which is warmer than today's universe (270.27 degrees Celsius)." I'd like to buy a math transform, an inverse abs() function please?

Oh, and you can type the - sign. You know, this has been used to signify subtraction since the dawn of the computing age (... and even before). So, do you really believe that this sign was not present in the oldest character encodings such as ASCII?

In fact since due to time dilation, everything that drops into a blackhole seems to freeze at the event horizon, the energy radiating from the black hole must equal the energy that will be lost as a function of the matter that falls in.